


Glass Houses

by flightlessnerds



Category: Twenty One Pilots
Genre: Angst, Crying, Established Relationship, First Kiss, Guilt, Multi, Polyamory Negotiations
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-04
Updated: 2019-03-04
Packaged: 2019-11-09 02:10:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17992862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flightlessnerds/pseuds/flightlessnerds
Summary: "I don't want to make this all aboutme."Jenna shrugged, coaxing his guilty fingers loose."It's about all of us."





	Glass Houses

**Author's Note:**

> my one brain cell is dedicated to Jenna

He came home ruined.

Jenna was unprepared. She had thought, by now, that she was ready for anything. In the last six years, she’d dampened flames, navigated through fights and nightmares, through meltdowns and breakdowns and dark moments; she was used to Tyler’s tears, his moodiness, and even the most twisted versions of his terror. 

But Jenna had never seen him look as ruined as he did now, tonight, leaning against the doorframe of their living room like it was the only thing holding him up. 

_Finally,_ she’d been planning to say when she’d heard the front door. She was planning to stand up, pause the TV, catch him in a kiss, coax out a shy smile; ask him, teasing, _what took you so long_? 

But the moment she caught a glimpse of his expression, and took note of the way he was holding himself, the words dissolved in her mouth. Something was wrong - or at least, something was wrong with _him._

“Tyler,” she spoke, hoping the sound of his name would settle him back into himself.

It did - or at the very least, it seemed to coax some air back into his lungs. 

But just as quickly as the breath had filled him, it was flying out again in a panicked sob, followed by a quick inhale, until he was full on shaking, crumbling in front of her, collapsing his way across the room and onto his knees. Clutching her around the thighs, Tyler let his trembling head and shoulders fall against her lap - and despite the worry and confusion that clutched at her chest, Jenna found her hands automatically flying to his hair, fingers moving soothingly over his scalp. 

“Ty, love,” she breathed again, accompanying each word with a drag of her fingertips from one hand, a pass of her flat palm over the back of his neck with the other. “Baby, breathe.” 

She knew enough to understand that asking him flat-out what was wrong wouldn’t make any difference. Making demands would move them nowhere. The best she could do was bring him back down to earth; tell him, with hands and gentle words, that she was here - would still be here, holding him, even after he said whatever he had to say. 

She knew him well. 

It took a while, but eventually, Tyler’s breathing slowed and his grip on her thighs relaxed. Jenna took the opportunity to clasp one of his hands in her own, bringing it up to press her lips to the inside of his palm. 

She squeezed his hand once, gentle. 

“Tell me, Ty.” 

His next inhale was fractured, broken into a hundred smaller, tearful breaths. 

“I’ve ruined everything,” he said into her knees, and she could feel his face screw up again with tears, voice tightening as he continued. “I fucked up so much.” 

The fear that had begun to grow at the first sight of Tyler’s face started to wind itself through Jenna’s insides, tightening vice-like around her heart. She tried to keep her expression composed, for both of their sakes, pushing down the flashes of drastic scenarios flashing through her mind, each as unlikely and terrifying as the next.

Together, paralyzed, they gripped each other; they held tight, trembling and silent, as if afraid that the truth might seep through if they left too much room. 

“How, love?” she finally managed, and the term of endearment brought on another wave of hot, silent tears from Tyler.

Jenna felt him push himself closer to her, resting the side of his head against her stomach and looping his arms around her waist. It wasn’t as if they hadn’t been in this position a hundred times before - but this was different. This time, she could tell, it was the devastation of fear and guilt, layered on top of the usual love and comfort, that was keeping him from letting go. 

_Whatever happened has already happened_ , Jenna reasoned with herself. There was no point prolonging the inevitable. 

In a gesture that she hoped was equal parts tender and firm, Jenna tilted up Tyler’s tearstained face with both hands, forcing him to look her in the eye. 

“What happened, Ty?” she asked, outright. With her hands on either side of his face, he couldn’t look away if he wanted to. Jenna made sure of it. 

Lips pressed together, like he was afraid of what might come out of them, Tyler breathed deeply through his nose. Eyes closed, and one watery breath later, he spoke. 

“I stopped by Josh’s house on the way home,” he said, almost mechanically, like every word was a chore. 

Inhale, exhale. He looked her in the eye, and all at once, out of nowhere, she knew what the words would be before he said them. 

“And I kissed him.” 

She felt Tyler’s breath stop. She felt his whole body stop, numb, against her. 

She waited for more. 

When it didn’t come, she felt the tangled sinews of her terror undo themselves, slightly, deep inside of her. 

Not that this was nothing; _no no,_ Jenna thought - this was definitely something. It was something she would begin the work of processing as soon as her synapses started firing again, as soon as she regained feeling into her limbs, still paralyzed from the last five minutes of certainty that something catastrophic and unfixable had happened, something that they could never come back from. 

“You kissed him,” Jenna repeated experimentally, trying the words out, the pronouns out, on her tongue.

All Tyler did was shiver. From guilt, from fear, from the memory of what he was describing, Jenna didn’t know. 

“Oh,” she added, a needless punctuation mark to the sentence that had echoed between them. 

Her hands were still on his face, she realized - it hadn’t even occurred to her to take them away. Somewhere in the back of her mind, Jenna knew rationally that she wasn’t following the script for how this moment was supposed to go. She still had hands on him, gentle and generous, and nowhere in her whole body was there even the smallest urge to break the contact. She needed it as much as he did. 

Jenna swiped both her thumbs along the hollows under his eyes, wiping away the tracks of tears that had already fallen. She leaned close. 

“Do you want to tell me about it?” Jenna said quietly. 

Tyler blinked up at her, like he didn’t understand. 

“About-” 

“The kiss,” Jenna hummed, brushing a thumb through the beginnings of fluffy hair at the top of his forehead. “Sounds like it gave you quite the shake-up.” 

She watched Tyler’s forehead furrow, face molding into an expression of soft, pained confusion. 

He shook his head slowly, looking at her knees. “No, no. I can’t let you- like - _nurture_ this all away, even if it will make things -” 

“Tyler-” 

“ _No,_ ” he interrupted, somehow firm and broken at once. “I did something that betrayed your trust. I hurt you.”

He looked, Jenna realized, as if he were trying to work out a particularly difficult math problem; all knitted brow and and hardened eyes, like no matter how many times he tried to piece two and two together, something wasn’t adding up. And that was Tyler all over; always making things more difficult than they needed to be, for the sake of doing what was Right. She wished she could impress upon him that sometimes, what was _right_ wasn’t something that anyone else could know or decide for them. This was their story to tell, and it was being written, right here, right now, with Tyler tense and tearstained in her lap. 

He wasn’t looking at her, but Jenna shook her head anyway. 

“How about I decide whether or not I’m hurt?”

She hadn’t expected it to satisfy him, and she’d been right. 

“I don’t,” Tyler began, fingers digging absently, desperately, into her thighs, “I don’t want to make this all about me.”

Jenna shrugged, coaxing his guilty fingers loose a little. 

“It’s about all of us,” she reasoned soberly. “There’s no point going through the motions of, like, a certain set of reactions, just because you think that’s what the reactions are _supposed_ to be.”

Tyler blinked, so she went on. 

“There’s no set template for all of this, Tyler. We get to decide how it goes. And if you feel like you owe me something,” Jenna added, “then okay, you owe me this: tell me about kissing him.” 

Finally, Tyler pulled back onto his knees. His face was alight with color, wet and wrecked and red. He almost seemed to sway on the spot; Jenna suspected that he might have toppled over if he wasn’t still gripping her fingers where they rested on the edge of the couch. 

It occurred to Jenna, in the moments before he spoke, that this was infinitely more painful for him than it was for her. 

“He - he brought me over after we left Mark’s, because he wanted to give me time to hang out with Jim alone so we could, like, bond, I don’t know,” Tyler began very quickly, breathing deeply through his parted lips. “He wanted me to give Jim a bunch of treats and stuff, because he said - well, he said I relate to everyone through food.”

Jenna couldn’t resist laughing gently, but Tyler, eyes still trained fixedly on Jenna’s knees, didn’t seem to register the sound. 

“It had been so long since we hung out like, that, just the two of us, you know? Not that -” he looked up, pained, struggling with something between his mouth and his brain. “Not that I don’t - you know, when all of us-” 

“I know, Ty,” she interrupted, squeezing his hand. “Go on.” 

He breathed out, long, through his nose. “We did that, I guess, and then we ate a little and looked at some tweets from fans on the couch, and he just looked so…”

Tyler trailed off, curling his fingers tightly, until they were balled into fists in Jenna’s hands, nails dragging against her palms. 

“And I wasn’t thinking,” he blurted in exasperation, voice twisting and rising in pitch. “I don’t know what made me do it, it was so _stupid_ of me, but it felt - it felt like it did in the beginning.” 

The last part of his sentence slipped out so fast and quietly that Jenna felt sure, as soon as it was in the air, that he hadn’t been planning on saying it. 

“It felt like how it used to,” he repeated, still looking straight down. “And he looked so - he looked so… and then… I kissed him.” 

She felt his hands go slack in hers. 

“Yeah?” Jenna spoke quietly, and Tyler nodded like his head was on a string. 

“Yeah,” he whispered. “Just for a few seconds. It was barely anything, but it was…” 

“It wasn’t nothing,” Jenna finished. 

Tyler shuddered again, expression pained. 

“And then I realized it was the worst thing I could have possibly done, so I… so I left.” 

Jenna blinked at him, straightening up and releasing his hands. “You - like, you just left?” 

Tyler stared, meeting her eyes again, fear starting to seep back into his gaze. 

“Well yeah, I… I had to get back to you,” Tyler murmured, like it was obvious. 

“And Debby wasn’t home, or anything? You kissed him, and then you left him alone?”

Tyler opened his mouth defensively, but stayed silent, and Jenna watched the weight of understanding settle on Tyler’s face. 

“I’m...” he finally whispered. “Awful.” 

Jenna stood up, and Tyler let her. She kicked off her slippers, grabbing for her jacket where it rested on the back of an armchair. She could feel Tyler’s eyes on her as she made her way around the room, looking for her keys. 

“Ty,” Jenna admonished, glad to finally have something to be productive about, somewhere to direct her energy. She was pressing pause on the process of absorbing this development. She was in motion again. “C’mon.” 

In slow motion, eyes pressed closed, he nodded. “Yes. Yeah. Okay.” And, swaying only slightly, he rose up from the ground and followed her towards the front door, towards the car, towards Josh.

On the front porch, Tyler stopped her with a brush of repentant fingers on her arm. 

She caught them in her own, and watched him stare down at their entwined hands so intently that all Jenna could see were the long, clustered lines of his eyelashes. 

One breath later, and she was meeting him halfway. His lips on hers were a familiar comfort, and new all over again, at the same time. Jenna brought a hand to the back of his head, keeping him against her, afraid that shame or shyness would try to pull him away. 

Framed in the lattice altar of their front porch, Jenna let her mind wander back to another moment like this one, her in a dress, him with a ring, clutching at her for dear life - how eager he’d been to seal that promise, how carried away he’d gotten in that kiss… how carried away Tyler _always_ got with love, until it had to leave his body in some form or another; how the force of it propelled him forward. It had propelled him again today. 

“Jenna.”

She met his eyes, hand still in the back of his neck. 

“I am so, so sorry,” he whispered, voice thin and damp with humility. 

“I know you are, Ty.”

Tyler leaned into her hand despite himself. “I broke your trust.”

“A little,” Jenna conceded, taking his hand and squeezing. “But you’re already earning it back.”

**Author's Note:**

> okay like i never thought i would write a fic like this, like ever. but like a little while ago i realized that all my poly fics are so idealistic? and i wanted to see what happened if someone messed up. 
> 
> anyway your relationships are your own and only you can decide what’s healthy
> 
> also i posted this in two parts so i can force myself to finish it s o r r y


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